This is not a discussion concerning the existence of God, but rather on the nature of humans to invent, copy, emulate or simply pretend.

"...the largest collection of knowledge ever assembled."

It has been said that "the Internet is the largest collection of knowledge ever assembled."

It is man at his best, at his worst. It contains the accumulated thoughts of billions of people and it is the largest depository of human information ever formed. On that same note it is also the largest depository of wrong information, disinformation and naiveté. Man's innermost soul, his aspirations as well as his worst thoughts, fears and ignorance. The Internet and web (yes I know the difference) are the purveyors of open thought, quality thought, creative thought, as well as narrow mindedness, cruelty, idiocy, insanity and vanity. Socially and economically the digital medium has redefined social interactivity and impulsiveness.

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
...Voltaire

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Do you want to bake a cake? You can find recipes. Do you want to build a house? You can find plans, blueprints and supplies... See beautiful sunsets and enjoy all types of entertainment? Do you want to build an atomic bomb? You can find the plans...

Everything is here. And often one can find the quite significant information at no cost. Many e-prenuers give it away for free. While some entrepreneurs have made fortunes here, there are still many Internet business models still searching for a profit and still others have failed due to their success!

Now back to our subject: Inventing e-God...

"One voice speaking through many...
One mind projecting its mind as many..." -- Radio discussion with Art Bell and Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.

Many religions, put forth a general concept that we are all part of God and that God is part of each of us. It is proclaimed that God is an all knowing, all mighty entity and influences every aspect of our lives, yet we still have free-will... (?)

Perhaps we are, all fragments of a larger whole and therefore that "larger" is also present in each and everyone of us. The Internet may just be man's latest venture into creating a God model. The Internet is NOT God, but perhaps it is man's most ambitious attempt to build God or at least the knowledge portion of God.

As time goes on, we will no doubt invent more hardware that will interface with the Internet's rapidly expanding knowledge base and perhaps we will eventually develop unimaginable methods of homologating all of that information -- the science fiction of artificial intelligence is becoming the science fact -- a machine capable learning and making decisions based on the logical and the illogical... will this be God... or will we be God?

Many years ago, in the first wave of PC use, a number of text based computer games became quite popular. A game text-based called "Zork" required the player to interact with the computer by typing phrases and keywords... Zork contained a database of phrases and words that it could string together to seemingly "understand" the user's questions or directives. Even in those early stages, it was obvious that a computer was capable of making an appropriate response in a manner that a human could understand. If you asked Zork something that it was not programmed to recognize, it simply returned a phrase, such as -- "I don't understand that phrase or word..." The game was a rudimentary beginning but the early mechanism was already in place. Today computer easily are capable of rendering proper responses to submitted queries, but they are also now very intuitive. Many programs feature routines which allow the computer to analyze user activity and deduce appropriate responses before the user even poses a query.

Weighted Randomness

Besides analytic abilities the computer requires at least one other characteristic of human behavior to aid in decision-making. The almost illogical characteristic of taste is taste -- the gray area of decision-making. When a proper response to a given situation is unclear it becomes necessary to base the decision on factors other than logical ones. Sometimes it is necessary to base a decision on personal taste or more subjective factors, however even those factors may be modified and re-modified based on the challenge that is presented. Modeling this kind of response is a difficult and daunting task. There are many thresholds to take into consideration, and many places in a given path that can change direction... and in turn those detours may then send the problem solving in ever more directions with even more deviations. Even though it is possible to create multiple weighted and seemingly random patterns, which in turn would also port to more weighted; seemingly random patterns... the task would take a very long time to adequately complete.

In essence a God model, is quite an ambitious undertaking... and what about the spiritual aspects? How would those be achieved?